This date in baseball: Reliving the Yankees' Derek Jeter's 3,000th hit 15 years later

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. – Michael Kay and Joe Girardi had the same view of Wednesday night’s Yankees-Rays game.

Now YES Network colleagues, the pair called the game from the visitor’s TV booth located directly behind home plate at Tropicana Field.

Exactly 15 years ago Thursday – July 9, 2011 – they were also at the ballpark, this time sharing a historic moment at Yankee Stadium, from vastly different viewpoints and in vastly different roles.

On a sunny, 84-degree Saturday afternoon at Yankee Stadium, under a bright blue sky pockmarked here and there with cumulus clouds, Derek Jeter became the first Yankee, and still the only one, to record 3,000 hits (exclusively wearing pinstripes for the entirety of his career).

Jeter, who entered the afternoon with 2,998 hits, led off and singled in his first at-bat against tough Rays lefthander David Price, still in the peak of a distinguished career.

With the Yankees down 1-0 entering the bottom of the third, Jeter, after a Brett Gardner groundout, stepped in and battled Price to a full count.

On the eighth pitch of the at-bat, Price threw a 78-mph breaking ball.

Kay, now 65 years old and in his 35th year as a Yankees broadcaster, the last 25 on television, took it from there on YES.

“3-2. That one’s drilled, deep to left field, Going back (Matt) Joyce. Looking up…See ya! 3000! History, with an exclamation point! Oh, what a way to join the 3,000 hit club! Derek Jeter has done it in grand style!”

The call, which has endured and is still frequently heard, and not just on YES, was not scripted, though Kay did plagiarize from himself.

Kind of.

“I’ve told this story a couple of times before, I had a dream the night before where I was announcing the game and that’s what I said when he hit a home run (for his 3,000th),” Kay told Newsday this week. “Then when it was happening in front of my eyes, the words just came out. I didn’t plan it at all.”

Did Kay, at the time, feel he “nailed” the call?

“I don’t know if I felt I nailed it, but I thought it was a good call,” Kay said. “My only concern in moments like that, when you know something good’s going to happen, you just don’t want to mess up the call to play alongside history in the moment. You just want to not be intrusive and not having your blown call overshadow his great moment. I knew that I didn’t mess it up, let’s put it that way.”

Girardi, then in the fourth year of his 10-year run as Yankees manager, recalled the “electricity” of the afternoon, something he remembers to this day.

“I think about memorable moments for regular season games – no-hitter, a perfect game, that kind of thing,” said Girardi, who played 15 years in the majors and caught Dwight Gooden’s no-hitter (1996) and David Cone’s perfect game (1999) while with the Yankees. “There aren’t a lot of moments during the regular season that necessarily stand out to me in my life, but that did. You feel fortunate that you’re a part of something like that, that you’re lucky enough to be there, in whatever capacity.”

Jeter, then 37, came into the afternoon struggling at the plate, hitting just .257. Girardi said he sensed the weight of the chase for 3,000 hits – which was a season-long event, really – affected the Yankee captain.

“It was an everyday thing. You don’t know when it’s going to happen,” Girardi said. “It just weighed on him a little bit, I think. He never chased individual stuff, he chased winning. And because he was so consistent and so good, the individual awards took care of themselves. But that’s not what he chased… There was no situation that ever fazed Derek Jeter, but that weighed on him, that 3000th hit. And he took off after that offensively.”

Indeed, Jeter went 5-for-5 in what was a 5-4 victory over the Rays and hit .326 with a .381 on-base percentage over the final 64 games. He finished the season hitting .297 with a .355 OBP.

Kay, meanwhile, feels forever indebted to Jeter for providing him with multiple memorable calls, including his “Mr. November” radio call from Jeter’s walk-off homer against the Diamondbacks in Game 4 of the 2001 World Series and his YES call of Jeter’s walk-off RBI single to beat the Orioles in his final career game at Yankee Stadium (“Derek Jeter: where fantasy becomes reality!”).

“I’m proud that it still hits the right way all these years later,” Kay said of Jeter’s 3,000th. “It doesn’t come off as corny, it kind of fits the moment, it’s kind of been accepted. A lot of people come up to me, and they say they like that call the most. People ask me my favorite call, that’s certainly in my top three or four. So I just like the fact that it’s kind of aged well.”